Deterministic Petri Net Languages as Business Process Specification Language

Abstract A process specification language is being developed for virtual manufacturing that provides a structured portable definition of a given manufacturing process as well as the ability to specify the temporal relationships between individual operation steps that compose a process. Based on the concepts embodied in markup languages such as HTML, SGML and XML, a portable process definition structure is defined. This structure provides a template from which virtual process specifications can be created. Subsequently, these structures can be exchanged between development environments for virtual process engineering and the actualized manufacturing facilities where processes are implemented. In addition, dependencies in time between the operation steps of a process such as common start times and operation serialization can be represented to allow for a complete specification of temporal behavior of a given manufacturing process. By providing this explicit mechanism for representing temporal constraints, a virtual manufacturing process can be viewed and utilized both in a localized application on a single virtual factory floor as well as distributed across multiple, interlinked virtual environments.

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Process Specification Language (PSL): Results of the First Pilot Implementation

10.1115/imece1999-0713 ◽

1999 ◽

Author(s):

Craig Schlenoff ◽

Mihai Ciocoiu ◽

Don Libes ◽

Michael Gruninger

Keyword(s):

Manufacturing Process ◽

Specification Language ◽

Process Information ◽

Software Applications ◽

Process Specification ◽

Discrete Manufacturing ◽

Manufacturing Information ◽

Semantic Concepts ◽

Pilot Implementation ◽

Share Information

Abstract In all types of communication, the ability to share information is often hindered because the meaning of information can be drastically affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted. This is especially true in manufacturing because of the growing complexity of manufacturing information and the increasing need to exchange this information among various software applications. Different manufacturing functions may use different terms to mean the exact same concept or use the exact same term to mean very different concepts. Often, the loosely defined natural language definitions associated with the terms contain so much ambiguity that they do not make the differences evident and/or do not provide enough information to resolve the differences. A solution to this problem is the development of a taxonomy, or ontology, of manufacturing concepts and terms along with their respective formal and unambiguous definitions. This paper focuses on the Process Specification Language (PSL) effort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology whose goal is to identify, formally define, and structure the semantic concepts intrinsic to the capture and exchange of discrete manufacturing process information. Specifically, it describes the results of the first pilot implementation, where PSL was successfully used as an interlingua to exchange manufacturing process information between the IDEF3-based ProCAP1 process modeling tool and the C++ based ILOG Scheduler.

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Specifying Business-Level Protocols for Web Services Based Collaborative Processes

Advances in Systems Analysis, Software Engineering, and High Performance Computing - Distributed Computing Innovations for Business, Engineering, and Science ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-2533-4.ch007 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 137-154

Author(s):

W. L. Yeung

Keyword(s):

Web Services ◽

Web Service ◽

Business Process ◽

Specification Languages ◽

Business Process Execution Language ◽

Negotiation Protocol ◽

Collaborative Processes ◽

Process Specification ◽

Business Process Execution ◽

The Web

Business collaboration is increasingly conducted over the Internet. Trading parties require business-level protocols for enabling their collaborative processes and a number of standardised languages, and approaches have been proposed for specifying business-level protocols. To illustrate the specification of web services based collaborative processes, three inter-related specification languages, namely, the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), the Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), and the Web Services Conversations Language (WSCL) are discussed in this chapter. A contract negotiation protocol is used as an example to illustrate the concepts involved in the specification. The chapter also discusses different strategies for deploying these specification languages.

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